TUJ Internship November Entries

Oof, that month was kind of a doozy...Hopefully this one will get better! I only have 2 weeks left, so even if it's not that great, it won't be too much longer until I can leave. Let's see how it goes, shall we?

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Monday, November 7th

Today was my first day with K2. I was excited to start working with Mr. Brandon and Mr. Michael because it seems like they really collaborate on everything they do for their class. My first hour was uneventful because they don’t arrive until 9 AM, but I still got to play with the kids in the library/treehouse area, which is always a blast.

A very interesting observation I made was that the K2 students still don’t understand when teachers say something wrong as a joke. For example, when Mr. Brandon was going over the calendar during morning circle, he often would say the wrong day or month. The students always got excited and say “no!!!!” when he said it’s Tuesday or Thursday because they know it’s Monday. I have noticed all teachers do this to some capacity in their classrooms and the students always have the same excited response. One of the K3 students’ names is Haruki, but it sounds a bit like Tanuki, so I kept pretending that I was hearing “tanuki” over and over instead of “Haruki.” Hana kept saying “Noooooooo, it’s Haruki!!!!!” and it was clear that she genuinely couldn’t understand that I was joking around. It’s so fascinating to me that children are not yet able to comprehend this type of joke at their age, but they have such vast imaginative abilities. What is also interesting to me is that students sometimes make their own jokes like this. When a student says something funny during morning circle and Mr. Brandon makes a joke about it, other students start to do the same thing. For example, during attendance, if a student says their name funny, such as slurring their words because they are tired, he will say something like “Hello skldfjnzkjslf, good morning,” and then other students will say their names funny as well.

I got to observe Mr. Michael’s language arts class, which is very similar to Mr. Ricky’s. From what I remember the students had the same little pouches with their words and they all had relatively short words to group together. After language arts, we had park time, and then we came back and the students ate lunch. Similar to the other classes, I took my lunch break when they were eating their lunches too. Once I returned, Mr. Brandon and Miss Olivia were teaching and all of the students had LEGO kits out. I had seen them with these kits before, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to help, so I observed during this time.

The rest of the day was very similar to the K1 class, with the exception of playtime being in the library. I got to check their bags before they went to play, and I learned that Mr. Brandon will also check how full their water bottles are. If they are emptier than 1/3 to ½ of the way, he will fill it up. I really like getting to check their bags and having a little bit of individual time talking to the students.

Wednesday, November 9th

Today, I was able to observe another language arts class with Mr. Michael. He provided them with a new set of words and asked them to sort them into groups again. The hardest task for them was to make three groups. He prompted them to get creative and said that the groups didn’t all have to be the same as their neighbor’s, but most students were very confused and kept looking at what everyone around them was doing. I actually wasn’t able to figure it out until Mr. Michael gave the hint of “3, 4, 5,” which stood for the number of letters in the word. The group with 3 letters only had one word, “off,” which is what I think tripped up the students the most. Group 4 had 5 words and group 5 had four words, so it seemed off that there would be a group with only one word when the others relatively had so many more.

After language arts, the K1 class had mathematics with iPads. Mr. Michael paired the students into groups of 2 to share an iPad. I believe he paired students at around the same math level, so not all students were doing the same exact activity. I really like the Khan Academy app. I thought it was very fun and the animations made it extremely interactive. However, I wasn’t really sure how to help out. Mr. Brandan suggested that I walk around and talk to students as they solve the problems, but I found that I either ended up usually distracting the students or found that a student was so confused that I had to slowly walk through every step with them. It was very interesting to me how students in the same class could be at such different levels of understanding. We had been doing addition and subtraction during the previous class, but some students still did not understand the concept of using subtraction when there is an equation with a blank in the addition side. (Example: 4 + ___ = 7  7 - 4 = 3)

Two K1 students injured themselves during park time, so I helped them because I was the first teacher to notice. I felt bad because I was cleaning and bandaging Yui when Mr. Jordan said “bye bye park,” but many of the K1 students had come over to see what was happening and weren’t listening. I did my best to ask them to give us space and to line up to leave the park, but I got nervous that Mr. Jordan was upset because they were not lining up and watching me help Yui instead.

I have enjoyed meeting the K2 students, but I didn’t get to teach much and felt unhelpful. At the end of the day, Mr. Brandan and Mr. Michael suggested having me teach a lesson. However, they said that they already planned out the week ahead, so they weren’t sure where to fit me in.

Monday November 14th

Today was not very exciting. I was hoping to be able to teach today, but that did not happen. When I got to GGIS, Mr. Brandon and Mr. Michael weren’t there yet, so Ms. Yuko asked me to cut out some laminated sheets of Japanese currency. There were sets of all of the coins and bills to do. I was happy to have something to do, but I was a bit sad I couldn’t play with the kids in the library during this time. I had pretty high energy at the start of the day, but it went away after standing/sitting around. There were several things I felt I could have done today. For example, during math class, the students had to make their own math problems. I strongly feel that I would have been able to make up a quick example for the class. I also think I would have been able to lead the class during programming to have them find the pieces in each section. Initially, I was standing and watching because it seemed that they were able to find the pieces on their own very well. Many were restless and started playing with the LEGOs on their table and mixing them with the friends at their table, which is exactly why we had to sort the kits in the first place, so I told them to put the pieces back and advance to the next part. However, Ms. Olivia asked me not to continue ahead and stay on the same page as Mr. Brandon. I was always able to check the back 2 tables very quickly and felt that there wasn’t a need for 3 teachers. It could have been more productive if we split the class and I did the back half while Mr. Brandon and Ms. Olivia did the front half.

My favourite part was going to the park because I got to play with several K3 students; Genta, Tomoka, Uta, and some other students took my shoes while I was hanging upside down on a pull up bar and they thought it was really funny to hide them so I couldn’t get down without having to step in the sand. I really don’t mind getting dirty, but it was cute to joke around and act like I was really stuck on the pull up bar because they kept hiding my shoes farther and farther away from me.

At the end of the day, we did another run through of the winter performance. I was very impressed with the K2 and K3 students’ abilities to memorize their lines. I was standing “backstage” with Mr. Brandon and Ms. Olivia and wasn’t quite sure what to do because the students were all very restless and nothing could really be done to keep them quiet or still. Mr. Brandon also seemed quite occupied with lining the students up for the next scene, so I asked Mr. Michael if there was anything I could do in the meantime, such as help prepare materials for the week. I believe he also asked Ms. Akino for something to provide me with while the students rehearsed. I understand that there isn’t much for me to do since I did wasn’t around during the initial stages of developing the play, and I won’t be there for the final performance, so there isn’t much I can help out with directly. Eventually, he told me that they were going to have the students try drawing a world map tomorrow in social studies and suggested I could find an image for them to use as a reference or brainstorm fun ways to do so. I was very excited to be able to help with this and went to get an iPad to look for images. Most of them were low on battery, so I began plugging them in and started thinking about color coding the continents too. As I was plugging iPads in, Mr. Michael called over to me to say that Mr. Brandon preferred for me to be “backstage” again and help with keeping the students’ composure. I was very disappointed that I no longer was able to work on the world map activity. Once I got backstage, he showed me the lines needed for the next scene and said that I could call the students over to line them up. I did not feel it was more productive for me to do this No matter how many times I asked students to be quiet, they never listened. They didn’t even listen to Mr. Brandon or Ms. Olivia, so it didn’t make sense for me to be there as well. Later, both Ms. Olivia and Mr. Brandon had separate instances where they were stern with the students; Mr. Brandon even had to raise his voice to get their attention. At one point, I was trying to get the students to be quiet, and Mr. Brandon chimed in. I said that if they kept being loud, they wouldn’t earn rainbow sticks. Mr. Brandon then added that their play time could be in danger. I added on that getting play time was their choice and that if they wanted to play now, they wouldn’t get to play later, but if they behaved well now, they would keep their play time. This only dissuaded them momentarily. At the end of the day, Mr. Brandon didn’t give anyone rainbow sticks except for one student, Ko, who was the only student to get to “Wow!” on the behavior standings. They also lost 10 minutes of play time, which I thought was a fair consequence for their behaviour.

Wednesday, November 16th

To start the morning, Ms. Yuko asked me to cut out 34 pieces of paper for hot air balloons. I was very happy to be given something to do as soon as I arrived at GG. Many students kept coming up to me to ask and watch what I was doing, as usual, and I love talking to them while I’m working on something. Once I finished, I was talking to Haruki as he was creating a paper jack-o-lantern, and he even taught me how to say it in Japanese! I always call him tanuki, so I had the idea to make a quick drawing for him of a tanuki named Haruki. Then, more and more students asked me for pictures, and I wanted to give something to remember me by before I left, so I got to work drawing. Ms. Yuko shortly came over to tell me that if I was drawing, I had to sit with the kids and talk to them while doing so. I understand how this is helpful for their learning, but every time someone tells me to do this, they say that the students will always be willing to talk to me, and they often are more occupied with what they are doing. As someone who has a strong understanding of language acquisition, I completely understand that just talking to them in English is helpful and getting engagement is important. However, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal to make me try to talk to them while they were actively focused on something else. This is not the first time I have been asked to speak to the students when I didn’t have much to do, but the students weren’t very talkative and it was mostly me prompting them when it was clear they would rather be doing something else and sometimes walked or ran away from me when something else caught their attention.

For language arts, I observed Mr. Brandon’s class this time, which consists of writing practice. I really liked watching his class and seeing how well the students could write. However, it quickly became clear to me that they didn’t always understand what they were writing. Many of them still wrote letters backwards, like s and z; One student even wrote the number 4 backwards, which I thought was adorable. Mr. Brandon was very thorough in his explanations and used a lot of repetition to reinforce essential aspects of writing, such as beginning sentences with a capital letter and ending them with a period. He even used “Christmas” in one of the example sentences they had to write, but the students definitely didn’t understand why it had to be capitalized.

Instead of math class, we practiced the musical numbers again for the winter performance. Then, we went to Keiyo park. Etowa was crying as we were starting to leave because Ko said she didn’t like her and then they had to hold hands the whole time. She then told me that she is always crying to her mom about Ko, so I took a couple of minutes at the start of play time to talk to him. He told me that Etowa and Hana went to konbini together and Etowa was saying she didn’t like Ko, so I was trying to ask him if he said he didn’t like her just because he was upset or if he actually didn’t like her. Then, we talked about how even if we don’t like people, we should still be kind to them and we don’t have to tell them to their face. The rest of play time was lots of fun because Genta was playing with my hair and I also went on the seesaw with Yoshihito, Wuta, and Tomoka. They really enjoyed how high they bounced because I was able to go pretty fast. After going on the seesaw, I took some time to talk to Yoshihito about school and used a little bit of Japanese with English to gauge his understanding. I asked him what kind of foods he liked in Japanese and then asked him if he knew what the words for them were in English. He knew about half of them, which was great! I then suggested he try to talk to his friends more in English to help get better at English, and then asked who his friends were. He told me that Etowa and Liyo were his friends, which made me really happy that he already has friends at GG.

Once my day was coming to an end, I had my interview with Mr. Jesus about the administrative side of GGIS. All of the answers were very interesting because I could see the truths in what he was saying, but some other things were not as apparent to me. For example, I got to better understand the hierarchy/heterarchy of faculty positions at GGIS. After our interview concluded, I went to say goodbye to my class, and most of them didn’t understand that I was leaving GGIS permanently, which was heartbreaking. Hiroa has already become very attached to me and kept hugging me, and Etowa even said “Miss Casey, I love you,” which warmed my heart so much. Mr. Brandon and Mr. Michael even gave me flowers and created a card that all of the K2 students signed. I am so happy that I have something physical to take home with me.

I was overcome with so much joy and sadness because I felt so loved and appreciated, but it broke my heart to leave the students. I couldn’t hold back my tears, and some got confused, asking why Miss Casey was sad. I received one final hug, and then gave all of the teachers at GG a goodbye hug as well before I left. Interning at GGIS was such a large part of my study abroad experience and I will never forget my time spent there.